Sweetish Hill

            The first place that I lived in Austin was a vegetarian co-op house a couple of blocks from campus, and it was there that I really learned to cook large quantities of food.  When given a choice of chores to do, I always chose more cooking. We all read  Diet for a Small Planet, a book that advocated getting off of the top of the food chain and presented detailed charts and recipes that combined grains and legumes in order to create complete proteins, and many a culinary crime was committed in pursuit of achieving this balance.  My palate will be forever haunted by memories of whole-wheat noodle casseroles, among other atrocities.

            I took this background and used it to get hired at a new French restaurant that had recently opened called P. S. Sweetish Hill.  The owners had first opened up a bakery and sandwich shop over on the East Side, and this new location was to be their full-service restaurant, and the first time, to my knowledge, that haute cuisine came to Austin. Patricia, my boss, had trained in France and, in turn, trained me. Sweetish Hill was my Cordon Bleu, and I learned whatever fundamentals I didn’t already know in that job, cranking out pate, hollandaise, coquille St. Jacques, etc.  We even had to make mayonnaise by hand, with a whisk; Patricia insisted that the texture was so much better that way.  A friend of mine actually got fired for sneaking it into a food processor.

            I worked the night shift, and it was very slow going at first- I was glad that I wasn’t waiting tables, depending on tips. I worked with a woman named Helen who was also new to the trade, and we became good friends. She’d just returned from a long trip through Central America and had wonderful stories to tell.  She was also a strict vegetarian, so I  “had” to taste the scallops and the steak tartare, pretending to be disgusted.

            When they started serving brunch, business finally picked up, and on the weekend nights we’d poach dozens of eggs in advance.  But I didn’t think it would be enough to keep them open, didn’t believe that Austin was ready for haute cuisine.  Fortunately, I was wrong.  When I got back from my own trip to Central America,  many months later, I had to wait in line to get a table for brunch.  All I had to do to continue my culinary career was say that I’d worked at Sweetish Hill, and I was hired immediately.  I kept at it for another decade or so, with breaks for school and travel.

            Sweetish Hill is still open, but they moved to a smaller location and it’s more of a bakery and sandwich shop- as it started out.